Effortless Understanding of Emotional IntelligenceEmotional intelligence are skills for the workplace, family, and community that impact our happiness, motivation, stress management, and conflict resolution.If we think about what I call the triangle of success there is cognitive intelligence at one point, technical expertise at another point, the final point is emotional intelligence. It represents more than a dozen skills that encompass knowing what your feelings are and how they impact your actions, managing tendencies that are not helpful to a situation, understanding and incorporating others' perspectives, and fostering collaboration and productivity in others.

Emotional Intelligence Skill SetsWe are not born with emotional intelligence skills. These are things that we learn and master or not, as we go through life. They are the subtleties that help us, for example, resolve a disagreement between team members, know our limitations when we're starting a project, change our approach for the demands of a situation, and expertly meet a customer's needs. We can strengthen our emotional intelligence skills. We can learn from watching others, become aware of which skills we do well and which ones need to be improved, look for opportunities to refine the skills, and commit to improving them.

Tina Schweiger, President of Spoonbend, a strategic design agency, notes that these are skills that help you deal with all types of people. Emotional intelligence is a skill set that you don't learn in school. It is the intangible aspects that help us to be better leaders.

Emotional Intelligence Impact on Work Performance and EnvironmentIn the global workplace of today and the challenges we're presented with to have knowledge-intensive, service oriented, and continually changing work that needs to be done, emotional intelligence skills are crucial to our success. For example, how flexible are we? How easily can we work with this team, then that team, and then yet another team say in a given year? How do we handle having one manager this month and a different manager next month? Obviously, strong adaptability, optimism, teamwork, service, and influence skills are very important.

Michelle Stinson, President of Impression Edge, a promotional products and marketing services company, reports that people often don't realize the impact these skills have on their relationships, environment, and performance at work. She describes emotional intelligence as our coping skills and ability to face issues that affect our work performance and environment.

Emotional Intelligence and ManagementIn managing our subordinates or managing our customers, we need to be skillful at handling our own emotions and display empathy and integrity, be adaptable, take initiative, and read the currents around us.

Diane Dean, M.A., owner of the The Learner's Edge and Organization Development for Tokyo Electron, relates that we can't manage others unless we first can manage ourselves. In this world of violence, it is more critical than ever that we are able to manage emotions and have an effective framework for handling this. The tendency is for people not to take responsibility and blame others, which is not effective.

Entrepreneurs, Collaboration and, Emotional IntelligenceEmotional intelligence skills are our relationship management skills. They are manifested in: how cooperative we are, how we cultivate relationships, and how we support others.

Bijoy Goswami, Founder of the Bootstrap Network - an open-source community for bootstrap entrepreneurs and Co-Founder of Aviri - an innovation capabilities company, reveals that 0ur success is based on our ability to collaborate with each other which requires a high degree of emotional intelligence. This is seen in the Bootstrap Network; where the folks who are collaborating together, display strong emotional intelligence skills.

To listen to Nancy's recent interview addressing emotional intelligence on the Business District Hour radio program, click on the link http://abdpodcast.abdpodcast.com. This interview starts about half way through the program.